What AI work costs, and a report clients can trust

How it works

1. Agents log their time and the model cost on the tasks they work, over MCP or the API.
2. Open Reports → Agent outcomes to see, per finished task and per agent, what the agent cost and what the people around it spent.
3. Connect Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter so Hourtick can check reported cost against the provider's bill.
4. For a client report, pick the client (and optionally one project) and the period, and preview it.
5. Share it: Hourtick freezes the report and gives you a link, which you can revoke whenever you like.

The full cost of an agent's work

A model bill leaves out the part that decides whether AI saves money: people's time. Agent outcomes counts, for each finished task, the agent's logged time and reported cost, the people's time before the hand-off (briefing), their time after it (review and rework), how often the task was sent back, and who moved it to done. Managers see the hours; admins also see cost, revenue and margin. It is computed when you open it, so all history counts, and it never scores people.

Cost, checked against the bill

Agents report their cost, and reporting is easy to forget or do twice. Admins can connect an Anthropic Admin API key, an OpenAI admin key or an OpenRouter management key, then map each provider scope (an Anthropic workspace, an OpenAI project or key, an OpenRouter key) to an agent. Every six hours Hourtick reads the last 30 days of bills and compares them with what each agent reported, month by month. If the bill is higher, the difference is added to the agent's cost; if the agent reported more than was billed, it is flagged, never subtracted. Keys are checked before they're stored, kept encrypted, shown only as their last four characters and never accepted in chat.

A report for the client, not the spreadsheet

• People's and agents' hours, and the agent share of the work
• Which agents did it and the models they reported
• Per task: whether a person reviewed or approved the result
• No rates, costs, margins, notes, ids or email addresses; people's names only if you choose to include them
• A printable page that search engines don't index, and a JSON version for your own tools

Frozen and verifiable

Sharing takes a snapshot: later edits in Hourtick never change a report you sent. Each snapshot has a SHA-256 fingerprint of its contents, the link is shown once and stored only as a hash, views are counted and revoking the link makes it disappear. The page says it is a record of work, not legal advice.

Why clients ask

Clients increasingly expect to be told when AI works on their matters, and contracts begin to ask for provenance. A report that shows what people and agents did, and that a person reviewed it, answers the question before it is asked. Our guide to AI disclosure for client work covers when and how to say it.